Religion and Humor as Emancipating Provinces of Meaning

239 Pages·2017·2.339 MB·English

by  Michael Barber (auth.)

Contributions To Phenomenology 91
Michael Barber
Religion and
Humor as
Emancipating
Provinces of
Meaning
Contributions To Phenomenology
In Cooperation with The Center
for Advanced Research in Phenomenology
Volume 91
Series Editor
Nicolas de Warren, KU Leuven, Belgium
Dermot Moran, University College Dublin, Ireland
Editorial Board
Lilian Alweiss, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland
Elizabeth Behnke, Ferndale, WA, USA
Rudolf Bernet, Husserl Archive, KU Leuven, Belgium
David Carr, Emory University, GA, USA
Chan-Fai Cheung, Chinese University Hong Kong, China
James Dodd, New School University, NY, USA
Lester Embree, Florida Atlantic University, FL, USA
Alfredo Ferrarin, Università di Pisa, Italy
Burt Hopkins, Seattle University, WA, USA
José Huertas-Jourda, Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada
Kwok-Ying Lau, Chinese University Hong Kong, China
Nam-In Lee, Seoul National University, Korea
Rosemary R.P. Lerner, Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, Peru
Dieter Lohmar, University of Cologne, Germany
William R. McKenna, Miami University, OH, USA
Algis Mickunas, Ohio University, OH, USA
J.N. Mohanty, Temple University, PA, USA
Junichi Murata, University of Tokyo, Japan
Thomas Nenon, The University of Memphis, TN, USA
Thomas M. Seebohm, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Germany
Gail Soffer, Rome, Italy
Anthony Steinbock, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, IL, USA
Shigeru Taguchi, Hokkaido University, Japan
Dan Zahavi, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Richard M. Zaner, Vanderbilt University, TN, USA
Scope
The purpose of the series is to serve as a vehicle for the pursuit of phenomenological
research across a broad spectrum, including cross-over developments with other
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establishment in 1987, Contributions to Phenomenology has published more than
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seminal questions of human inquiry as well as the increasingly international reach
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The series is published in cooperation with The Center for Advanced Research in
Phenomenology.
More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/5811
Michael Barber
Religion and Humor
as Emancipating Provinces
of Meaning
Michael Barber
Department of Philosophy
Saint Louis University
Saint Louis, MO, USA
ISSN 0923-9545 ISSN 2215-1915 (electronic)
Contributions To Phenomenology
ISBN 978-3-319-62189-0 ISBN 978-3-319-62190-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-62190-6
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017944727
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For I, except You enthrall me, never shall be
free
John Donne, Holy Sonnets 14
For Lester Embree and Ollie and Shiloh
Roundtree
Preface
To suggest that one can find in Alfred Schutz’s philosophical writings a concern for
human emancipation might strike one as an unconventional claim. For many of his
best readers, he was up to other tasks, more fittingly described as epistemological in
a very broad sense: demarcating the place of the sciences with reference to each
other within the scaffolding of a complex Wissenschaftslehre, providing a philo-
sophical foundation for the social sciences, or making available useful tools for the
analysis of art, literature, politics, human creativity, semiotics, symbol theory, com-
munication, economics, the information society, or whatever topic might serve as an
intersection point in which one’s expertise, intellectual interests, and Schutz’s writ-
ings converge. In addition, to claim that Schutz was interested in such a value--
directed ideal as human emancipation seems to run contrary to the Schutz known
especially through interchanges with his intellectual associates. After all, how
should we envision Schutz as interested in human emancipation when he seemed to
share the conviction of many in the Austrian Economic School that reason should be
understood as instrumental, explaining means to ends, without entering into norma-
tive debates about what ends one ought to adopt? In addition, Eric Voegelin thought
that Schutz was entirely too reticent about his ultimate values, relying on his descrip-
tion of a generalized relevance scheme that could accommodate a wide diversity of
possible relevance rankings without committing himself to what he took to be the
right relevance ranking or the right ethical standpoint. Finally, Aron Gurwitsch, at
least indirectly, challenged Schutz’s treatment of the stranger as too focused on
trivial recipes for action that help individuals adapt to society instead of on the
nobler Husserlian project of being accountable to rational standards and challenging
contemporary nihilism. Indeed, Gurwitsch insisted on holding human society
responsible to such standards so that the massive catastrophe that was taking place
in Europe and that had made Schutz, him, and their friends strangers might never
happen again. This book will try to illustrate the potential for human emancipation
that can be discerned in Schutz’s works, but it will no doubt also be elucidating, on
the basis of Schutz’s writings, an understanding of emancipation that Schutz him-
self might not have shared if it were proposed to him. Consequently, the
vii
viii Preface
development of the position that religion and humor can emancipate us from the
imperatives of pragmatic everyday life represents the position of the author of this
book.
The place in which I will locate this view of human emancipation lies in his
theory of multiple realities that afford us relief from the pragmatic interests through
which objects become “relevant to us” and by which our everyday engagement with
objects and persons, called the “world of working,” is governed. These relevances,
or interests, become particularly visible when we must deal with events and circum-
stances that are imposed upon us and that we need to adapt to and come to terms
with through our systems of intrinsic relevances, that is, our already established
scheme of relevances. Such pragmatic relevances are in themselves morally neutral
since to fail to attend to such relevances would be to jeopardize our survival and that
of others. Of course, the pragmatic relevances that we pursue necessarily confine to
the margins of our awareness of other values, such as aesthetic ones, or other aspects
of our existence, such as the uniqueness of our experience, which is not nearly as
useful to us as the repeated experiences which we are familiar with and which
appear as typical to us.
But I will tell a larger story about everyday life pragmatic relevances whose
projects normally engender a tension of consciousness from which we need respite.
In addition, such relevances can generate, on a meta-level, efforts to defend our
lower-level projects, and these meta-level efforts can expand into a hydra-headed
monster defending against all intruders and generating personal anxiety and societal
pathology, from which other non-pragmatic “realities” (such as literature, dream-
ing, scientific contemplation) can rescue us. In addition, I will demonstrate that
since the non-pragmatic realities, or “provinces of meaning,” can themselves be
subordinated to the very pragmatic purposes of everyday life from which they were
meant to free us, more is needed than simply to enter those provinces of meaning.
That “more” is the perspective of someone else whose point of view exceeds our
own and who can complete the emancipation begun when we entered such non- -
pragmatic provinces of meaning as religion and humor.
Consequently, this book is much more than an effort to interpret Schutz in a
novel way. Taking as a starting point Schutz’s understanding of the pragmatic
dimensions of everyday life and the interpretation I will make of them, particularly
the world of working, and his view of the non-pragmatic finite provinces of mean-
ing, which, I will argue, afford a liberating potential, I will discuss in depth two of
the finite provinces of meaning to which Schutz made reference but never devel-
oped: the provinces of religious experience and humor. In a single paragraph in “On
Multiple Realities,” on the shock experiences through which we enter various finite
provinces of meaning, Schutz mentions Kierkegaard’s leap into the religious sphere,
and he alludes to the joke as pertaining to a fictitious world. Although there are
certainly elements of phantasy in the humorous sphere, I will argue for a broader
understanding of humor that encompasses jokes but includes much more insofar as
interlocutors leap together into the humorous sphere and “make humor together,” in
such a way that the many dimensions of their relationships and the comments they
make are all part of the humorous sphere. Following Schutz’s account of the six
Preface ix
features of the cognitive style of the world of working, I will show how the prov-
inces of religion and humor modify and exhibit these six features in innovative
ways. I will also demonstrate how these provinces free us from the pressures of the
world of working and hence need to be seen as part of an emancipative
undertaking.
I have chosen to concentrate on the provinces of religion and humor, not only
because they were suggested but never developed by Schutz but also because they
exemplify the potential for emancipation sketched above. Both religion and humor
are significant areas of life-world human activity often neglected by philosophy and
deserving of philosophical discussion. Furthermore, this book will illustrate how,
considering both through the Schutzian prism of finite, emancipating provinces of
meaning, we will be able to understand their mutual connections and the way in
which each illuminates the other.
This project began with my editing of Schutz’s writings on literature with Dr.
Jochen Dreher, director of the Sozialwissenschaftliches Archiv Konstanz, which
appeared as Volume 8 of the Alfred Schütz Werkausgabe: Schriften zur Literatur
(Schutz 2013c) and some of which appeared in English translation in Volume 6 of
Schutz’s Collected Papers: Literary Reality and Relationships (Schutz 2013a), par-
ticularly Schutz’s unpublished manuscripts on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship) and Zu Wilhelm
Meisters Wanderjahren (Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years), which I translated
(Schutz 2013b). In the latter manuscript, Schutz defends von Goethe against critics
who charged that his later 1829 revision of the Wanderjahren novel showed signs of
senility insofar as characters within a novella within Goethe’s novel suddenly appear
in the main action of the novel itself. Further, these characters seem able to navigate
the world of the novel without many details being provided by Goethe about how
these characters would have known how to do this navigating. At a decisive point in
Schutz’s argumentation, he makes it clear that this critique of Goethe seems to
require that he should have provided the quantity of details that one would need in
the sphere of everyday life and that his novel should have complied with the meta-
physical constraints of everyday life, in which characters in a novel never appear
outside the novel. However, Schutz (2013b, 357) argues, there is a “logic of the
poetic event” that does not follow the logic of everyday life or the logic of rational
theorizing. Because Goethe’s novel dispenses to a degree with the restraints of
everyday life, the critics accuse him of succumbing to a carelessness reflecting
senescence. For me, it was marvelous to see Schutz defend Goethe by wielding his
notion of multiple realities through which he was able to delineate the imaginative,
dreamlike character of another whole reality, literature, in which characters would
not have to master carefully all the details needed to travel to a destination.
In addition, the 2009 Conference on Phenomenology, Social Sciences and the
Arts held at the University of Konstanz and issuing in the publication The
Interrelation of Phenomenology, Social Sciences and the Arts (Barber and Dreher
2014), also edited with Dreher, illustrated how the idea of multiple realities can
illuminate the arts. Particularly useful essays in this regard are Martin Endress’s
“The Man Without Qualities and the Problem of Multiple Realities” (Endress 2014),
x Preface
Thomas Eberle’s “The Art of Making Photos: Some Phenomenological Reflections”
(Eberle 2014), and Gerd Sebald’s “Crossing the Finite Provinces of Meaning:
Experience and Metaphorizing of Literature and Arts” (Sebald 2014). These essays
limit themselves to constructing intriguing interplays between the idea of multiple
realities and particular works of art, artistic practices, or literature, in which each
clarifies the other. Over the years, various Schutz scholars have drawn out interest-
ing implications from Schutz’s theory of multiple realities, such as Hisashi Nasu
(1999), who has shown how conceiving the world of the child as a multiple reality
might lead to a richer sociological investigation of parent-child relations than if one
attributes to the parent and child the standard roles taken up in everyday life.
Likewise, Fred Kersten (1998) carefully distinguishes the everyday sphere, which is
presentive of its objects, as opposed to literary reality, which is non-presentive but
in which I feign characters who perceive a presentive world. Endress’s introduction
to Alfred Schutz and his works, Alfred Schütz, offers helpful suggestions for under-
standing how the non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning are differentiated from
everyday life (understood narrowly as the world of working, itself a finite province
of meaning) and pertain to the life-world in its broadest understanding, as encom-
passing the intentionality and attitudes (of all the provinces of meaning, pragmatic
and non-pragmatic) that one lives in prior to the phenomenological reduction
(Endress 2006).
I know of no published work that has dedicated itself specifically to analyzing
the notion of provinces of meaning or to explaining the relationship of the finite
provinces of meaning to the world of working in terms of the project of human
emancipation as this work does.
At the prodding of my recently deceased friend, Lester Embree, over many years,
I presented a paper on religion as a province of meaning at the conference entitled
“Phenomenology as a Bridge Between Asia and the West” in Kaohsiung, Taiwan. At
that conference, I emphasized the opposition religion offers to pragmatic tenden-
cies. Participants in the conference rightly raised the question as to whether religion
does not also need to insert itself into the world of working; to make use of physical
symbols, signs, and communication, which presuppose bodily gearing into the
world; to institutionalize itself to some degree; and even to seek to develop virtues
in its members so that they can embody religious values in the world of working.
These very helpful comments led me to the discovery of a dialectic between the
non-pragmatic finite provinces of meaning and pragmatic everyday life, in which
the non-pragmatic provinces represent alternative ways of inhabiting everyday life
than that which is exemplified in everyday life bound to working and the pursuit of
pragmatic goals. While offering alternative relevance rankings to those prioritizing
mastery of the world, these non-pragmatic provinces, however, must continually
revert to the working acts of communication to sustain themselves and convey their
benefits to others.
Part I, the first three chapters, will present the pragmatic world of working that
the non-pragmatic provinces of meaning resist, the communicative processes in
which those provinces embody themselves, and the expansion of pragmatic rele-
vances in the direction of hyper-mastery that can result in increased personal anxiety